Teenage entrepreneurs: how they made their millions

Think of teenage millionaires and cartoon character Richie Rich and his own personal rollercoaster might spring to mind. But there are many real-life teens who’ve capitalized on their creativity and ingenuity to make a fortune. Read on to discover how 10 amazing youngsters made their millions and how they spend it.

Nick D’Aloisio

British philosophy student and entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio founded his first company in 2011, aged 16. The app, Trimit, used an algorithm to condense text into bite-sized chunks for easy reading. After receiving $300,000 (£232,000) in funding from venture capital investors, D’Aloisio relaunched the app as Summly and hit the big time. He remains the youngest person in the world to raise venture capital.

Smartphones and their little screens were in their infancy, and there was limited mobile-only content available. Summly was a hit because it made it easier to read on smartphones by summarizing long articles into 500 words or even 140 characters. It attracted celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono, and was eventually sold to Yahoo! for a reported $30 million (£2.3 million) in 2013. D’Aloisio was just 18 and a millionaire.

D’Aloisio is now 21 years old. He worked at Yahoo as a product manager and launched a couple of new products, including the critically-acclaimed Yahoo News Digest. He left the company to pursue a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy at Oxford University. He has been busy with scholarly work recently, and his peer-reviewed article “Imagery Overflow: we see more than we report” has been published in acclaimed scientific journals.

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Jordan Maron

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1992, Jordan Maron found fame and fortune on YouTube, at a time when that was practically unheard of. Maron launched the CaptainSparklez channel in 2010 at the age of 18, where he discussed videogames. It was an immediate success. From early on Maron started partnering with brands in order to monetize his videos.

To date Maron’s channels have amassed over 2.8 billion views, and he has close to 10 million subscribers. He’s estimated to be worth over $8 million (£6 million), and in 2015 he invested in a $4.5 million (£3.5 million) in a swanky pad on the Hollywood Hills.

Though he is best known for CaptainSparklez, Maron is also a successful musician. He distributes his music through yet another successful YouTube channel called Maron Music. In 2015, he launched his own mobile gaming company, XREAL, too.

Brennan Agranoff

Brennan Agranoff is still in high school but last year he sold over $1 million (£770,000)-worth of custom-designed athletic socks. He is the founder and CEO of HoopSwagg, a start-up he founded when he was just 13 years old.

Brennan Agranoff/HoopSwagg

After noticing that the student athletes in his high school were all splurging on plain white designer socks, Agranoff wondered if they would be willing to shell out for better, more interesting apparel. After six months of research, he managed to persuade his parents to invest, and their $3,000 (£2,300) seed money helped Agranoff launch the business out of the family garage in Oregon.

HoopSwagg owes much of its success to social media, and today it employs 17 staff as well as Agranoff and his mother. The teenager runs the sock empire single-handedly, and has even taught himself to code so he could manage the website and online shop. To top it all off, he is graduating high school early with plans to grow HoopSwagg to retail in stores and offer more customized products like shoelaces and ties.

Juliette Brindak

Adults may not have heard of pre-teen social networking site Miss O & Friends, but it is very popular with American girls aged 8 to 16. Juliette Brindak created the character Miss O and her friends when she was just 10 years old, and her mother Hermine helped her design them. The company was officially launched in 2005 when Brindak was just 13.

Brindak has been the driving force behind the business. Her plan to keep it as a safe, age-appropriate and cool online destination for girls “who’ve outgrown Barbie’s but are not ready for Beyonce” attracted the interest of Procter & Gamble, who remain its biggest investors.

Miss O & Friends has around five million unique monthly visitors and is worth around $15 million (£11.6m), according to Procter & Gamble. Brindak was only 16 when Procter & Gamble got involved, and remains the CEO of the company now, nine years later.

Sean Belnick

In 2001, when Sean Belnick was 14 years old, he locked himself in his bedroom for three days. When he emerged, exhausted, he had created and launched BixChair.com and had gone into business selling office chairs. Barely six years later Belnick’s website had an amazing $24 million (£19 million) in revenues.

Belnick had saved up the $600 he initially invested in creating BizChair.com by selling Pokemon cards on eBay and mowing lawns, but by the age of 16 he was a millionaire. He has since sold chairs to Microsoft, Google and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Belnick still runs BizChair.com today. It operates out of a 70-hectare site in Georgia and sells over 25,000 chairs a year.

Emily Matson and Julianne Goldmark

Emily Matson and Julianne Goldmark were typical teenagers in 2009 – full of ideas and big fans of TV hit Gossip Girl. They loved the hairstyles of characters, but noticed there was nowhere to purchase similar accessories at teenage-friendly prices. That's when they launched Emi Jay – a hair accessories and apparel company.

Emi Jay

The business really took off when Jennifer Aniston stepped onto the red carpet wearing one of its hair-ties, and within a couple of years Emi Jay was turning profits exceeding $10 million (£8 million) a year.

All Emi Jay hair ties and apparel are handmade in Los Angeles and the girls always use sustainable fabrics, which has helped Emily and Julianne gain a massive online following. Today they are both in college, but they continue to run the business with their team. They are also dedicated philanthropists and donate 20% of all company profits to charity.

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Brian Wong

Canadian entrepreneur Brian Wong was a mere 19 years old when he launched Kiip, a platform that allows brands to reach people with advertisements when they are playing mobile games.

Kiip immediately piqued the interest of venture capitalists and Wong – along with partners Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi – has raised over $32 million (£25 million) in venture capital to date.

Wong, now 26, is still the CEO of Kiip and has written a book The Cheat Code: Going Off Script to Get More, Go Faster, and Shortcut Your Way to Success to inspire others to follow in his successful footsteps.

Jon Koon

Jonathan Koon was a millionaire by the age of 16 and a billionaire before he turned 30. Koon started out still in high school by importing car tuning accessories from Asia. By his 16^th birthday he was operating multiple accounts selling custom body kits, wheels, rims and stereo kits from Asian manufacturers via his company Extreme Performance Motorsports.

Koon really hit the big time when Extreme Performance Motorsports became one of the main suppliers for MTV’s classic Pimp My Ride TV series. He decided to take a break from business in order to attend Georgetown University, but by then he was already a multi-millionaire.

When Koon got his degree in international business and management, he decided to move into the fashion industry and bought brand 8732 from Jay Z. Today he runs Tykoon Brand Holdings, which runs a variety of fashion brands and he claims is worth $80 million (£62 million).

Robert Nay

Robert Nay was barely 14 years old when he developed Bubble Ball, an extremely popular mobile puzzle game. His app was downloaded over two million times from the Apple iTunes store in the two weeks after its launch in 2010, and has been downloaded 16 million times since.

Robert Nay

The teenager from Utah is said to have learned to code in his local library before spending a month writing the 4000 lines of code needed to launch the game. According to estimates, Bubble Ball earned Nay over $2 million (£1.6 million) in those first two weeks of downloads alone.

Though Bubble Ball is still available and popular for download, Nay has continued to develop smartphone puzzles through his company Nay Games.

Adam Hildreth

In the days before Facebook and Twitter ruled the social media roost, teenagers explored a variety of different websites for entertainment. Adam Hildreth was one of the first to cater to British teenagers online with his Dubit website, launched in 1999 when he was just 14 years old. Hildreth and his partners even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the youngest group of directors in the UK.

At one point Dubit was the biggest social network for teenagers in the UK and it earned Hildreth £2 million ($2.6 million) by the time he was 19. He also knew when to get out of the social media game as bigger fish like MySpace and Facebook emerged. Hildreth now advises companies on how to advertise and market their products for younger audiences.

He has also launched Crisp Thinking, a company that develops ways to keep brands safe from social media risks like illegal and offensive content, spam, scams, social PR crises, trolls, security risks, IP and trademark violations and regulatory issues.

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